Podcast Episode 91: Episode 64: You Love Frank Grand? We Love Frank Grand!

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In this special edition of RockCast, we sit down with Frank Grand, Web Director at NewSpring Church in Anderson, SC. Frank and NewSpring have been an integral part of the Rock community from the beginning. We appreciate their heart for "the big C" Church, and all the ways they've advanced Rock innovation.

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at rockrms.com/partners. Welcome to this special edition of Rockcast. We have a very special guest with us here today. I'm Emily Forman. We have Jon Edmiston. And then as our special guest, we have Frank Grand, who's the web director and a longtime friend of Rock and Spark Development Network. Welcome, Frank. Hey, thanks. I'm very excited to talk with you guys. It's going be a lot of fun. Well, we've been looking forward to this for a while too. We had the opportunity to come out and visit you in person a little bit earlier this year, and I've been really looking forward to reconnecting here on the podcast. So thanks for joining us and sharing our conversation with the community today. Absolutely. So we've been working with, your team at NewSpring for a very long time, and we actually talk with you on a pretty regular basis about some of the things that we're doing together. And I thought that might be a kind of interesting place to start is to look into a little bit about the projects we work on together and maybe talk a little bit specifically about your website. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, it's been a long time, honestly, since I came on staff. I've been on staff in Newspring since 2014 and got hired to lead our transition from our previous church management system to Rock. And at that point I think Rock was in beta, I believe at that point. And so I don't know, I feel it's a badge of honor to say, hey, been a part of it from the very beginning and guys on our staff here even before I was. So yeah, we've early on, I think we signed on for the fact of building not only a great product for us, for the big C church. And so that's how I've always viewed our relationship is yeah, we want to come alongside and fund things and help fund things that will serve NewSpring and our staff and our attendees. But we also want to align with, hey, what's going to improve the core product of Rock? What are the ways that we can do the things that we specifically are looking to do in a way that's gonna benefit more than just us? And you guys have been fantastic about working with us and giving us advice and just pushing the ball forward, not just for a big church or a small church or lots of staff or not a lot of staff, but the big C church. And so I know that's how I view our relationships. I'm very appreciative of how we work together in that way. And it's amazing how many of the features that are in Rock actually came out of a seed of an idea that you guys had or or a need that you guys needed. I mean, the big one that comes to mind is content channels. I mean, was something that as we looked at your, usage of Expression Engine, it was very similar to that. And so when you guys kinda showed us how that worked, it was , oh, well, we could do this thing called content channels. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's a great segue to kind of our biggest project over the last shoot. I don't know how. It's been a long time, but we are moving our entire front facing website to Rock. And so we've been working together with you guys on lots of great features that not only meet, have parity with the system we currently use, but are also going to help us really push the ball forward on making our site even better. Had somebody ask me the other day, hey, so why are we moving our site to Rock? And I think there's one word that hits it and it's personalization. And I say that knowing and hearing from the very beginning that that's been something that you guys have talked about from the very beginning of why you should have or why you could have your content in Rock. But we're just now getting around to moving that and looking forward to the possibilities of how we can personalize our experience through our site and our mobile app. Well, you guys have some unique challenges too because you guys have a ton of content. You have tons of devotions, tons of just content that you guys routinely serve out to your attendees. So that's that has been a challenge, but you're you're almost there. Yeah. We're we're really excited. Kind of the classic example I use is I remember a year or two ago sitting in a meeting with our discipleship teams asking about, hey, we want to tweak our baptism content on our site. And so probably most churches, the vast majority of the messaging on our baptism page is about why you should get baptized and encouraging you to get baptized. And the meeting was about, well, hey, we want to also serve people who just got baptized. And we also want to maybe figure out how can we talk to people who have already been baptized. How can they talk about baptism with their friends? And the conversation was, well, man, we need either a really long page to do all this content or, oh man, how awesome would it be if we could personalize this? And if you're already baptized, maybe we don't have to spend so much time telling you how to get baptized. And so I mean, that's maybe a low hanging fruit example, but that's the kind of stuff that we're excited to figure out. How do we get the right content to the right person at the right time. And as far as I know, there's no other system that churches are using that can do that from their front facing website directly tied to the people information on the back. And so we're super excited. And I'm excited for people to see the site because it's an amazingly clean, nice looking site. I mean, you guys have put a lot of effort into it and it shows. It's just amazing looking. Absolutely. We're definitely, , I know a lot of times I get to be the front facing voice for our team, but I'm definitely not smart enough to do any of that work. So we've got great people on our team that have worked extremely hard to get us to where we're at. And maybe as a segue to future part of this conversation is we're really excited to show it off and talk about our journey to it at the conference this summer or this fall. Yeah, that's great. We're actually really looking forward to that too for a couple reasons. One, we hear from a lot of churches when they first contemplate making a move to Rock and they say, well, why would I want to move my website to Rock? I don't understand that. So, having some insight into why Newspring made that choice and why you've seen benefit from that will be helpful to the people asking those questions. The other thing that we hear is sometimes, well, I don't understand what my website would look . I don't want it to look Rock. And so obviously that is not the way their website would have to look. So seeing some examples of how when you put the resources and the dedication into the creation and design of your website, how what we're really talking about is is is a unique powered website that can reach your, multilayered audience in a lot of different ways. So having that as one of your conference topics is gonna be really exciting. But I think that also gives us a great time to say, hey. If you haven't heard, if you're living under a Rock somewhere, the conference this year is at NewSpring. So we are very excited about that. The trip that we made out recently was really to see the layout and kind of preplan that and boy did our team get excited about that. Yeah, we are stoked to be hosting. We've got an events team here at NewSpring that does I mean, I think they're second to none on hosting events for churches. Some of the listeners might have been at the CITN we hosted a few years ago. And so this is, I think this is probably the, since CITN probably the biggest conference we're going to host. And so we're really excited about just having it here, serving everyone that's gonna be here. And personally, I'm looking forward to seeing all all the friends and and the Rock family that we fostered over the last few years. Well, we're really looking forward to it. It almost feels a bit of a homecoming because as you mentioned earlier, we've been working with your team since, well, well over five years, and in the history of Rock, that's a pretty long time. Mhmm. So we're we're very excited about that. And then also, can I just, give a little compliment to your events team? Your events team is fantastic, and they almost feel even this, early in the in the planning stage, an extension of our team. It's been such a seamless interface. We absolutely have loved working with, your events team. So I just wanted to say a public thank you about that. They are fantastic. Pass it over. Yeah. Please do. So we're we're looking forward so much to the conference. There's going to be a lot of great information to share that your team will have, but we are hearing so much. In fact, how we've always had a best practices track for the community? And sometimes it's been challenging to get people to speak. Not that they don't have great content, but the concept of speaking in front of other people has been a little intimidating because a lot of our audience, lot of our technologists that are in Rock are not typical public speakers, and so they get nervous. But I think over time, they've seen that it's not about the public speaking, it's really about sharing the things that make ministry happen and the tips and tricks that will make someone else's job easier. And in fact, this year we've had so much interest in speaking that we've had to open a second best practices track. So I'm really looking forward to the amount of really high quality content that is going to happen at this conference. Yeah, that's awesome. And again, maybe not to completely turn this into a conference pitch, but I mean, my favorite part of the conference is seeing again people who you can tell aren't comfortable speaking, but are so knowledgeable about the specific thing you're talking about. And in a twenty minute talk, okay, , you can tell, hey, I need to go find this person afterwards. And so my favorite part is all the conversations afterwards, before sessions, late into the evenings, whether that's at the venue or at the hotels. I mean, we've grown tremendously from talking with other churches, big, smaller, otherwise, because everybody's doing things a little bit differently. And that's, I think, also one of the beauties of Rock. And we're excited to have that all happening at the NewSpring campus. But that's another good point is you are having conversations and your team is having conversations with other churches, sure, at the conference, but outside of the conference as well. And I think that's something that a lot of people don't realize has been, you've devoted a lot of time to and a lot of energy to, and it's been a huge behind the scenes help to our team in engaging with churches that have a lot of questions at the introductory period of OutROC. Yeah, it's one of our favorite things. I used to do almost all of those And we've got a guy now on our team, Matthew White, who does a fantastic job of talking to churches now. But I mean, probably talk to two to three churches a week, , and it might start by just curious about Newspring, but it very quickly turns to, hey, so I hear your entire staff talk about this word Rock. And so it pretty quickly talks, , to what is that? What are you guys using it for? And we love having this be a way that we can give back not just financially, but give back with our time to talk with churches and help them understand why we made the move and why they may or may not, , Rock may or may not be the best thing for them. So we have a lot of fun with it. And again, have formed some great friendships just through quick conversations about our church management system, which is kind of awesome if you think about it. And I think that's so important that people see that and know that because I think inside the community, we have a few measures of how someone might be helping the community. And and and right now, it's mainly, , Slack points and q and a, metrics. But this conversation that you guys have, and and then lots of other churches are having with other churches, is a huge help to the Rock community. Mhmm. And we we are working on actually a feature that would help, track that, not not only for helping to show people that there's other ways to get involved, but also for it's it's nice for us to know who's who's, interested in Rock and who's having those conversations so that we can keep that in our database too. So we're gonna be rolling that out pretty soon because I I think it is one of those things that people look at those Slack points and think that's the only way I can help, , the Rock community, and and that's not true. There's so many other ways that you can help the Rock community. And and the conversations that you've been having for years is is a great example of that. Yeah. And I mean, what I wanna make sure to say publicly is that you don't have to be a big church or have been on Rock for a long time to do it. One thing I quickly learned is that whether you've got 100 people or 10,000 people at your church, we're trying to solve the same problems. Scale is different in that and there are things that both good and bad that come with scale. But I tell you, we've learned just as much from those hundred person churches asking us questions and showing us, oh, well, for this process, we do this as we have from other large churches or medium sized churches. So just put it out there for, , if you feel , oh, you're not a big church that you can still help the community. If you're using Rock in any way, talking to people about that, I think is just, it's critical to our community and it's helpful. It's really helpful for everybody. Yeah, that's really awesome. And you mentioned, John, to date, there's not a lot of external visibility about it in that topic, but the amount of pressure that it takes off the core team and the amount of help that it gives to the growth of the community is just something that we can't even measure it. It's just so incredible. So thank you for that. Oh, absolutely. And I said, it's a lot of fun. The last one I'll throw out there is we've I know I think a couple of podcasts ago, y'all talked with Tyler Vance at Life Church. So I've really enjoyed getting to know him. And the Spark team knows we kind of have a bunch of inside jokes that I won't go into here. But those are the kind of again, it started around a conversation around a church management system and has really grown into friendships around a piece of software. So again, it just goes to show, yes, it's serving a very specific purpose for our staff and ministries, but the communities, again, if I haven't said that four times already, the community is my favorite part about Rock. And you guys have a pretty or actually a really successful regional kind of community that you guys are a part of. Yeah. We're actually later this month having our it's our third or fourth regional user group kind deal. And so churches Fellowship Greenville, I mean, we've kind of partnered together. We're actually meeting at Biltmore Church in North Carolina this time. And it's cool. I mean, we've had meetings where there's been 10 or 15 of us and I think their last meeting there might've been 50 of us where we get around and do Ted Talk style, , five to ten minute presentations. And again, kind of the conference, we just say, hey, here's five to ten minutes on something cool we're doing or something new we're trying. And then afterwards we have lots of time where we just hang out and go, oh yeah, I want to go talk to that person about that thing. And so again, it's been really successful, really helpful and a lot of fun. Very cool. And then now our team also interacts with you on a weekly basis, right? We connect with your team every week. Yeah. Frank and I are on a call with Matthew and sometimes others once a week. Very cool. What kind of stuff are you guys working on together? Whatever Newspring needs, whatever whatever it is that week. It's usually a bit lately. It's been the website and some, , some new giving tools. And I I think the website it's an amazing site, but it's also pushed forward the features in Rock. I mean, already in Nine, there's two major features that it's it's kind of brought into creation, which was the asset tracking or asset manager, which is a really cool thing. And then content components was a big thing that that they wanted. But then there's a whole bunch of small features too. , there's some new lava short codes for for schedules and some stuff that other stuff that Brian wanted that was was really actually kinda fun. I mean, that's the kinda stuff that's fun to write. Yeah. Yep. I I love, I love our weekly meeting. And, , I said, getting to know you guys through the years, is icing on the cake. And we, , we talk a lot around, sure, we're contributing and we're developing new things. But I said, I'm a broken record at this point, but the community aspect, I mean, it's just I can't speak highly enough of what you guys have done to foster that for all of us at use Rock. We've talked a few ways that NewSpring has contributed to the community. I mean, there's obviously obviously financial contributions. There's time contributions. But I think another contribution that most people don't realize is, the risk that they take on because they actually run pre alpha in their production environment, which is very helpful for us because we while we're coding, it's one thing to code it, but then to see it as running at scale is totally different. And there's a lot of risk to that, and there's a lot of things, , that come up that they have to jump to that most churches don't have to. And because they do, then others don't have to. And I think that needs to be recognized. Yeah. That is pretty incredible. When we started that, I was one hundred and fifty pounds and I had a full head of hair. And after three years of that, man, you should if you've ever seen me, I'm definitely not one hundred and fifty pounds. And then with all this gray, I don't know where it's coming from. But because you do, others don't have to. Yeah. One small caveat. Just because you heard that Newspring does that, don't go jump onto that. Right. I mean, unless you have the the right resources. And also, it's good to talk through that because we we need to know that. Yes. I would I would definitely say we have weekly conversations around, oh, man, should we be doing this anymore? But, it's it's been great. By and large, it has absolutely been great. And it is another part that we intentionally say , hey, we'll blaze this trail to take advantage of some of the new features. So I don't want to make it sound we're just we're not getting benefit from it. So we're getting some of the cutting edge and trying out some of the new things. But we also understand that, hey, can help test to make things better for others as well. Yeah. We appreciate that. Yeah. The access that you allow us to have to the ministry, issues that come up through what you have, we feel, , extended an extension of your team, and so that gives us a lot of great insight also into what are those needs? How do we imagine the fixes for those? And and how do we, , help craft solutions together that meet needs? And so for us to be if we were to operate in a in a silo without having a more direct access we have with your team to actual feet on the ground ministry happening, , that would be that would be a totally different ballgame for us. So we we really value that. Same. And and another thing too that you guys provide, this one's more just for Spark, is is just encouragement. I mean Mhmm. We constantly get encouraging videos, letters from you guys that just it's easy to sit in the office and just code or or work on these projects, but it's really nice to see the ministry impact of them after the fact. Mhmm. And you guys have been awesome about that. I mean, there's so many times you guys have sent videos from your staff just talking about how features have made a ministry impact. Yeah. One of the things that I think we try really hard to do at Newspring is talk about technology and our processes as being directly related to ministry. Matter of fact, a plug in, one of my talks at the conference is going to be about how we use process to maximize our ministry. And so as a staff, we're very intentional about just linking the two and understanding that the Lord's provided us tools, the Lord's provided us you guys to help provide those tools that really can affect and expand ministry beyond what you could literally just personally remember in your brain or write down in a book. And so we love sharing stories and we love passing those on to you guys. As I'm sure lots of the listener base is IT and kind of techie minded, it's easy to only hear about the problems. Right. Hey, yeah, Rock is great, but here's three feature requests that we would love for you guys to add. And so our team needs constant encouragement. And so we're happy to provide that and pass that along to you guys who actually make it happen. I think another quick story, you guys, when you were here a while back, I think because NewSpring's been a part of it so long, a lot of our even NewSpring staff think we wrote Rock, which I've been trying to correct for years. But yeah, so John and Emily, guys, when y'all were here, , I went around introducing, oh, hey, these are the people that actually wrote Rock. We, , we did. Making sure that, , I said, passing on encouragement to the people that actually needed to have the credit and the encouragement is We just told them we worked for you, so Yeah. Right. Yeah. Don't encourage that here. It's it's great. Well, the videos and things that you send us have it's obvious that you put a lot of effort into those. Somebody put a lot of time into doing that. So it's a very different type of encouragement to have somebody just pour so much into it, and we , it it's very impactful to our team. And the power of those stories is incredible. I I and I know you're gonna put some of those into your your, session at the conference. Those stories, I think people need to come hear them because I've been using them as patterns to to encourage, , my personal church. , this is why you need to do this. This is why we do what we do. And, I mean, that those stories alone are gonna be worth the the ticket price. Mhmm. Yeah, John. Don't don't steal the thunder from my No. No. No. Those are good stories. That's good. Alright. Well, Frank, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a real pleasure to have you on the podcast. Absolutely. See you guys in a few months. That's right. I'll see you Wednesday. Conference. Oh. There you go. Alright. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Today's show was produced by Emily Forman. Nick was our recording engineer who turned the dials and pushed the buttons. Jim Michael handled all the audio post production mixing. And our amazing show notes, which you can find at BrockRMS.com/connect, were transcribed and written up by Michael Gerson. Do a church that loves the idea of using Rock but hasn't taken that leap yet? With managed hosting, churches of any size can get access to Rock's amazing technology, hassle free. With just one click, Rock's managed hosting removes the roadblocks that might stop a church from switching to Rock by making the process simple. Churches get the ease of a SaaS church management system without losing any of Rock's powerful features. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? Visit rockrms.com/hosting today.